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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

A Bear Down Addition

Upper
Deck has an ongoing College Manufactured Patch cards series. The last two
years they included school mascots and this year the patches represent school
tributes. I picked up the University of Arizona’s “Bear Down” tribute patch
last week. I had been watching the prices of the card since the 2014 Upper Deck
Football release and fortunately the prices have been dropping but seemed to
hit a plateau around $5 and I almost bought one but decided to wait instead. I
am glad I waited, this card cost me $2.99 shipped so I got a nice deal on a great addition to my University of Arizona collection.

The
“Bear Down” tradition comes from the death of a University of Arizona student-athlete,
John Byrd Salmon. Salmon was the student body President and a multi-sport
athlete as the football team’s QB and the baseball team’s catcher. Following
the opening game of the 1926 football season Salmon and two other students
headed to Phoenix for a visit, on the way back during the evening of October 3,
1926 Salmon crashed and rolled the car. The other two passengers survived with
minor injuries while Salmon severed his spine and died two weeks later. During Salmon’s
time in the hospital Arizona’s football coach Pop McKale visited him daily and
on the morning Salmon died on October 18th he told coach
McKale “Tell them…tell the team to bear down”.

The
term became the team’s rallying cry during the season and was adopted as the
school’s slogan in 1927. In 1939 the Arizona State legislature issued a decree
that “Bear Down” was the exclusive property of the University of Arizona and in
1986 the school commissioned a statue of John Salmon. Here is an image of the real
statue, which does not actually contain a plaque as shown on the patch.

In
2001 the state erected a monument near the site of Salmon’s crash outside of
Florence, which does contain a plaque (though in the shape of Arizona). So I am
wondering if Upper Deck decided to join the two to create a unique design.

1 comment:

About Me

I started collecting as a kid but by the time I hit my teens my interests were elsewhere. I returned to the hobby in 1992, just in time to see the junk wax era go in to full swing. My collecting interests have changed over the past 25 years and I prefer to focus on just a couple of players.

My collection is very specific now because I want to keep it controlled and organized, I now focus mainly on my Ken Griffey Jr. & Jay Buhner collections.